And Obama said that increasing the debt limit didn’t increase debt.
The debt of the federal government, which is normally subject to a legal limit, jumped by $409 billion in the month of October, according to the U.S. Treasury.
That equals approximately $3,567 for each household in the United States, and is the second-largest one month jump in the debt in the history of the country.
In the continuing resolution deal sealed by President Barack Obama and the Republican congressional leadership last month, the legal limit on the federal debt was suspended until February 7 of next year.
The single greatest one-month increase in the federal government’s debt came in October 2008, when Congress enacted the Troubled Asset Relief Program to bail out the financial industry.
In that month, the debt subject to the legal limit climbed by about $545 billion.
At the close of business on Sept. 30, 2013, the last day of fiscal 2013, the federal debt subject to limit stood at $16,699,396,000,000. At the close of business on Oct. 31, 2013, the first month of fiscal 2014, the debt subject to limit stood at approximately $17,108,378,000,000.
Thus, during October, the debt increased $408,982,000,000–or about $3,567 for each of the 114,663,000 households the Census Bureau estimates there are in the United States.
From May 17, when the Treasury was approaching the previous debt limit, until Oct. 17, when Congress enacted the CR suspending the debt limit until February, the Treasury reported that the debt closed each business day at $16,699,396,000,000–or about $25 million below the then-legal-limit of 16,699,421,095,673.60.
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Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSNews.com.